Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas will headline a GOP fundraiser in South Carolina on May 3. The speech is widely seen as Cruz testing the waters ahead of a possible presidential run in 2016. By that time, Cruz will have been in the Senate for four years, and if he keeps on his current course, will have lived rent-free in the heads of the Obama government and Organizing for Action that entire time.

Just three months into his tenure, Sen. Cruz already seems to be on the administration’s watch list. It responds to everything he says and does. All Cruz is doing is fulfilling his promise to represent Texas in Washington, rather than bring any part of Washington back to Texas.

In an interview with the Dallas Morning News last week, Cruz laid out a charge that President Obama is using the immigration debate not to pass a real reform, but to scuttle reform and use the failure as a weapon against Republicans in 2014.

The reason I’m pessimistic is I do believe President Obama wants to pass an immigration bill. His behavior concerning immigration leads me to believe that what he wants is a political issue rather than actually to pass a bill. What he wants is for the bill to crater, so that he can use the issue as a political wedge in 2014 and 2016. That is why I believe the president is insisting on a path to citizenship for those who are here illegally. Because by insisting on that, he ensures that any immigration reform bill will be voted down in the House.

“There’s no evidence to support those claims,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

That doesn’t mean they’re not true.

Obama henchman David Axelrod even declared that immigration reform is a “legacy” item for Obama now, to push back against Cruz. Maybe Cruz’s theory hit a little too close to the president’s true intentions, and exposed Obama’s plan to cynically use disappointment with immigration reform’s failure to fire up the left side of the Hispanic vote in 2014.

The Obama White House is certainly responding to the GOP threat, which includes Cruz, to filibuster any gun bill that hits the Senate, going as far as to mischaracterize where the American public is on new gun restrictions.

White House press secretary Jay Carney suggested Tuesday that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul are out of step with the public on gun-control measures.

The three lawmakers have threatened to filibuster “any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions.”

If anyone’s out of step with the public on gun control, it’s the Obama Democrats. Support for new gun laws is crashing, and support for a renewed “assault” weapons ban was never really all that strong to begin with. The Obama administration, the Democrats and the media have tried their best to bully Americans into supporting new gun laws, but most Americans aren’t going along with the plan.

A video posted to the Senate Democrats’ YouTube account by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggests that in January, Cruz declared his support for strengthening background checks.

“Right now, a lot of states, a lot of local jurisdictions, are not reporting criminal convictions, are not reporting mental health barriers to gun ownership, and so the federal database is not nearly as good as it should be,” Cruz told Fox News on January 6.

The Reid video displayed a headline from the DC newspaper The Hill declaring: ” GOP Sen. Cruz calls for strengthening background-check system for gun sales.”

Reid’s accusation wasn’t true in the slightest, as a check of The Hill’s reporting at the time revealed.

The Hill’s coverage in January makes it clear that while Cruz did support improving the background check database, he opposed Democrat’s push for gun control.

“Within minutes, we saw politicians run out and try to exploit this tragedy, try to push their political agenda of gun control,” Cruz said in the article, referring to the Newtown shooting. “I do not support their gun-control agenda.”

Cruz never did support that, and he never will. He is also very unlikely to go along to get along with anyone in Washington, as his fierce debate with Sen. Dianne Feinstein over the Constitution last month demonstrated. His simple and clear adherence to the nation’s body of law drew fire and smears from Democrats. Media keep asking him how he expects to get anything done if he keeps “offending” the likes of Feinstein. Media never ask similar questions of any Democrat, ever, now matter what they say or do that upsets anyone on the right.

Through these issue debates, two clear patterns emerge. One, the Democrats are willing and even eager to engage in dishonesty to pursue their aims. Two, Sen. Ted Cruz is calling them out on that, exposing the weakness of their arguments and questioning their intentions. In the process Cruz is evidently becoming enough of a threat that he is forcing them to respond to him. The freshman senator from Texas is calling the tunes and making the Obama White House dance. That’s a pretty good sign for his prospects in 2016 and beyond.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

Drudge uses "legacy" as an adjective to "media" in the way that old DOS software was "legacy" under Windows 95. That strikes me as the way any sensible pol would regard immigration "reform" as an issue in 2013.